


Your Love Was Unmoved

by Serendipity_Stupidity



Series: Lost and Found Again [1]
Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Lost Love, Maria is so in love, Pining, so so so in love it hurts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 03:46:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18402464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serendipity_Stupidity/pseuds/Serendipity_Stupidity
Summary: Carol came to her, as if she were the ocean pulled by the moon, and walked into her open arms like someone finding dominion. She tucked her face into her shoulder just like she always used to, and for a few moments, Maria closed her eyes, and let herself pretend that she’d never left.[The story, retold from Maria's perspective.]





	Your Love Was Unmoved

**Author's Note:**

> It's appalling that I, gay angst extraordinaire and renowned lesbian, have yet to write a wlw piece. This is for everyone who sat in the cinema and clutched their pearls with a quiet exclamation of "Harold!" 
> 
> The title is taken from As It Was by Hozier. Enjoy.

 

 

* * *

_Flashes_ , she says. _I get flashes._

 

She shrugs with her left shoulder, and Maria follows the movement absently, remembers pressing her lips to the curve of it in hazy morning light years ago.

 

_Little moments._

 

Maria looks away, keeps it together. She keeps her hands from shaking, keeps her voice steady. She stares down the ghost at her table and tells her about the last day she saw her.

 

“You woke me up,” She tells her, she doesn’t say, _you kissed me awake._ Instead, she says, “Banging on my door, your usual move.”

 

Carol - Vers - the ghost furrows her brow, ever so slightly. As if she were trying to work that into her narrative but it didn’t quite fit. Maria doesn’t give her a chance to dwell on it.

 

She tells her about the work they did, Lawson’s preposition to them both. She tells her about Carol’s propensity for disregarding rules, taking a shortcut in her beat-up Mustang, and it gets a peel of laughter that slips through Maria’s chest, sharp.

 

Her eyes still crinkle at the corners when she laughs, her smile taking the edge off. Maria thinks about sitting across from her in booths, surrounded by her laughter, tucking rims of beer bottles between their lips. She thinks about the first night she’d gathered up the guts to slip her hand into hers when they’d walked home together in the early hours of the day.

 

“I know this must be hard for you,” The spectre says, and it’s the same line Maria had been fed a thousand times by people who didn’t care about anything other than covering up government secrets.

 

_I know this must be hard for you, but no one can know._

 

So maybe her voice goes cold, and she feels herself saying something ugly, but she figures she’s earned this much. She figures after years of this _feeling_ , this heavy weight pressing her into the ground, she’s allowed to be a little cruel.

 

“Hard is knowing you were out there somewhere too damn stubborn to die - ” _and you didn’t come home to me “ -_ and now you come up in here after 6 years with your super-charged fire hands and you ask me to call you- I don’t even know what - Vers? Is that really who you are now?”

 

Maria knows that it’s not her fault - this blank slate of a person, this thing with Carol’s face.

 

She just knows that perhaps she would have been okay, if enough time had passed.

 

She knows that maybe, if she’d been given the chance, the memory of Carol could have settled into something fond, cherished, lucky to have been shared at all. If she’d been given a few more years, the ache of it could have been soothed by routine, good honest work, muscle memory of knowing that when she woke up, the left side of the bed would still be untouched. Just a couple more years, and maybe she could have figured out how to be alright on her own.

 

But now she knows that maybe she didn’t have to - maybe, if she had just be worth remembering - none of that would have happened. Nights and weeks and years of keeping face, living for Monica, living because she was s _tronger than this, dammit_ \- too stubborn to let this, or anything, stop her.

 

But the thought, that all this time, she could have been laughing in bars, leaning against pool tables, looking into Carol’s grinning face and wondering if she’d wear a ring, if she were to buy one.

 

All that time, and she’d been in a different star system, becoming someone else. There was a point in time when they knew everything there was to know about each other. Maria could write tomes about what she didn’t know about her now.

 

“I don’t know,”The ghost says, and that’s about the crux of it, Maria thinks. She didn’t even know her own name.

 

She tries to close off then, tries to shut it all down. But Monica’s voice rings out, soft in the wake of what had passed between them. They meet each others eyes, nod, once, and Carol follows her into the dining room.

 

Maria hangs back when she sees the photo’s splayed across the table. Carol passes her, dreamlike, as if pulled by strings.

 

Monica tells her everything, heartbreaking things Maria didn’t have the strength to tell her. That they were family, that she belonged here, that she was loved.

 

Maria doesn’t take her eyes of her face. There’s flickers, just like she said, of recognition - a crease between her brow as she takes it all in. Then, she’s brushing them aside to pick out the singed remnant of her dog tags.

 

 _That’s your name_ , Maria thinks, but holds her tongue. _That’s the name you were christened with. That’s the name you introduced yourself with.That’s the name I bite my tongue around when I see strangers who look like you in the street._

 

She seems to know, by the look on her face, without having to be told.

 

“That’s all that survived the crash,” Maria says, half-hoping that mentioning it would jolt everything into place, the memory alone - the plane banking hard into the sand drift, the kerosene tank catching alight - how could she have survived that? No one could.

 

Maria watched the ghost, eyes flitting over her face. She couldn’t possibly have survived, and yet she was standing right there, right in front of her. There was nothing amiss, not even a scar - just the soft curve of her mouth, the freckle on her cheek, the dark, clever eyes.

 

Maria dug her nails into her palms to stop herself reaching forward to tuck an unruly curl of hair behind her ear. She looks away when she speaks, feeling scolded.

 

“Or so we thought.”

 

* * *

 

Maria Rambeau liked to think that very little fazed her, but then she’d looked out into the back yard and seen herself - impossibly - standing there. It made her knuckles go white.

 

The thing had stroked her daughters hair, and Maria remembers little else besides a deep, silent dread until Monica was returned to her.

 

Now, she makes her put on headphones before following the others into her office, realising only too late that she should have forced herself not to listen either.

 

The blackbox leaves Carol stricken; Maria could see the shock of it vibrating under her skin. She paces about outside, like something powerful in a cage, chest catching on every inward breath.

 

Talos - another impossible being from a different star system standing on her front lawn - tried to get through to her, and Maria knew - logically knew - that she should be using it as a distraction to get her kid in the car, get them both as far away as she could but then Carol’s voice _breaks_ and Maria freezes -

 

“You don’t know me, you have no idea who I am - ” Maria’s chest locks up at the look on her face, like she was hurting and lashing out, frightened and vicious. She looked so young in that moment, like the first day she met her, eyes ablaze and too much to prove and her voice cracks when she says “ _I don’t even know who I am!_ ”

 

Maria’s body moves of it’s own volition, towards her, inexplicably, “You are Carol Danvers.”

 

She says it with conviction, feels it rise up from somewhere far inside her where she’d pushed it down. “You were the woman on that blackbox risking her life to do the right thing. My _best friend_ \- who supported me as a mother and a pilot when no one else would- ” - _you loved me when I didn’t think I had anything left to love - “ -_ you are smart and funny and a huge pain in the ass - and you were the most _powerful_ person I knew - way before you could shoot fire from your fists. You hear me?”

 

Carol is looking at her as if she’s too afraid to hope, too stubborn to let herself - and Maria knows that feeling, that sick, dreadful fear of being vulnerable - she looks into Carol’s frightened eyes and sees a mirror of herself. She knows, then, that everything she’d just said, she believed in.

 

“ _Do you hear me?_ ”

 

Carol came to her, as if she were the ocean pulled by the moon, and walked into her open arms like someone finding dominion. She tucked her face into her shoulder just like she always used to, and for a few moments, Maria closed her eyes, and let herself pretend that she’d never left.

 

* * *

 

“It’s hard for me to say goodbye, too,” Carol says, smiling softly, standing in the eaves of her porch in the nighttime, Monica tucked under her arm.

 

Maria thinks, _you have no idea._

 

Her chest aches, and she remembers the way Carol’s hair had haloed her face in zero gravity, her eyes set alight by the sun, remembers falling for her all over again - stupidly, pointlessly. She thinks, _you can’t possibly know all the things you mean to me._

 

She’d considered telling her, before she left. Just so that she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, out there in the stars, that she always had a home here - if she wanted it, if it was something she could possibly want instead of all the wonders of the universe -

 

She’d decided, ultimately, that it didn’t matter. There was nothing Maria could offer her - all she could do was hope the little she remembered of them would be enough.

 

She finds herself smiling back, instead, and keeps face. Six years had made her pretty good at it. Carol steps forward, arms open, and Maria walks into them, because how could she not - there was no telling when she’d see her again, or if she ever would.

 

The thought has her holding on for longer, reluctant to let her go, shutting her eyes against the brunt of emotion building in her chest. She pulls back before the feeling can consume her, keeps her voice soft when she says;

 

“Go on.”

 

She says it even though something small and frightened in her chest says _stay._ It grows evermore desperate with every step Carol takes away from her. _No_ , it says, _please_.

 

She could stop her, if only her legs would move. She could call out to her, if only she had the guts.

 

But Carol takes to the skies, and Maria stays grounded, just like all those years ago.

 

And then she was gone, in a bright flare of starlight, like a comet.

 

Monica turns to her, smiling, her face full of awe, and Maria forces herself to breathe.

 

When she reaches out, her hand is steady through will alone, and Monica returns to her side. She smooths a hand over her tight curls and smiles down at her, softly.

 

“Come on,” She says, tone gentle. “Time for bed.”

 

Monica accepts this without complaint, and Maria guesses the exhaustion from the last couple of days had caught up with the both of them. She climbs the porch steps on her own, and goes into the house first, taking herself to bed.

 

Maria pauses just before following her, turning to look up at the stars. She finds the courage, now that she was alone, to say the words she couldn’t.

 

_“Come home soon.”_

 

It’s spoken quietly, barely there, but Maria feels brave for having said it at all. She shakes her head at herself, and tiredly takes the steps, drawn by the promise of sleep.

 

_…_

 

_Somewhere, out in the gleaming expanse of the exosphere, a woman bathed in starlight hears her, and smiles._

 

The End 

**Author's Note:**

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> Thanks for reading, feel free to kudos or comment if you enjoyed! I'm considering writing a sequel to this, if anyone would be interested in that.


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